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As You Like It

As You Like It. Day Two ENGL 305 Dr. Fike. Looking Ahead. The midterm examination will cover MSND , MV , and AYLI , plus the histories, the Bedford Companion material, and concepts. You will need a large bluebook, plus 2 blue or black ballpoint pens.

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As You Like It

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  1. As You Like It Day Two ENGL 305 Dr. Fike

  2. Looking Ahead • The midterm examination will cover MSND, MV, and AYLI, plus the histories, the Bedford Companion material, and concepts. You will need a large bluebook, plus 2 blue or black ballpoint pens. • Your annotated bibliography is due on March 3rd. • Detailed assignment sheet: http://faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL%20305/305%20Annotated%20Bibliography%20Assignment.htm. • The Analysis Paper is due the next time we meet (and we will meet in the library).

  3. Review • Key concepts: • Primogeniture: a system of inheritance that caused problems for younger sons but kept a father’s estate intact. • Pronunciation from The American Heritage Dictionary: prī mō jen i choor. • Pronunciation from the OED:  U.S. /ˌpraɪmoʊˈdʒɛnəˌtʃʊ(ə)r/ • Pastoral literature: idealized nature, and social commentary. • Characters:the forest::audience:the theater ITO of renewal and rejuvenation. • Forest of Arden: Romanticized view of a place that had been decimated by Shakespeare’s time vs. the realistic portrayal of enclosure and poverty. • AYLI participates in the pastoral tradition: using rural persons to comment on matters in civilized society. Shakespeare seems to have been sensitive to the effects of “enclosures” (Bedford 230, 236, and 245-46), but he himself exploited the poor by hoarding food: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/9963602/Shakespeare-was-a-tax-evading-food-hoarder-study-claims.html • The other settings—manor and court—are sites of Machiavellian intrigue where the law of “kind” is violated. AYLI Chart

  4. Question • Write in class for 3 minutes about this question: What does the title of the play mean? You will have an opportunity to share your answer with the class.

  5. Others’ Answers to theQuestion about the Title “As its title declares, this is a play to please all tastes. ‘For the simple, it provides the stock ingredients of romance....For the more sophisticated…it propounds...a question which is left to us to answer: Is it better to live in the court or the country?....For the learned and literary this is one of Shakespeare's most allusive plays, uniting old traditions and playing with them lightly...’ (Gardner 161). “The title of the play came from a note to his ‘gentlemen readers’ in Thomas Lodge's book, Rosalynde, in which he said, ‘If you like it, so’ (Lodge 108). People interpret different lines and actions of the characters as they wish, and we know Shakespeare would not object; it says so right in the title of the play! Actors and Directors have taken this literally, and have made various changes to the script, such as having Phoebe gnaw on a turnip or an apple between her lines and having Rosalind kiss the chain before giving it to Orlando.” Source: http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=6140

  6. On Marriage, etc. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FPv2toi5og

  7. Mini-Lecture on Rosalind • As we prepare to discuss 4.1, it makes sense to think a bit about Rosalind. • Source: Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. • Comments on this book.

  8. Harold Bloom • http://www.yale.edu/english/profiles/bloom_h.html

  9. Bloom’s Comments on Rosalind • Bloom groups Rosalind with Falstaff and Hamlet but says that she is like Falstaff without the history and like Hamlet without the tragedy. • Falstaff is to humor as Hamlet is to intellect. • In other words, she is both funny and intellectual at the same time. • He also believes that these three characters are as close as Shakespeare ever comes to speaking in his own voice.

  10. Bloom speaks of Rosalind in incredible superlatives. • “Rosalind is vital and beautiful, in spirit, in body, in mind” (205). • “Rosalind is the most admirable personage in all of Shakespeare” (207). • “Rosalind is as integrated a personality as Shakespeare created” (209). • Rosalind is Shakespeare’s “unshadowed ideal” (209).

  11. More Superlatives • Rosalind “must be the most remarkable and persuasive representation of a woman in all of Western literature” (221). • And “did Shakespeare or nature invent the emotional inferiority of men to women?” (210).

  12. Discussion of Passages Related to Rosalind, love, etc. • Consider these passages before we view 4.1: • 1.2.244-45, 1.3.26-28: love at first sight. • 3.2.364-75 and 390-410: love sickness, love as madness. • 3.4.36-37 and 3.5.82: attitude toward fathers and love at first sight. • 3.5.35-63: Rosalind’s advice to Phoebe.

  13. Possible Paper • 3.5.82: “‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’” • 3.3.13: “a great reckoning in a little room” • 4.1.95-100: Hero and Leander, the Hellespont • How does Rosalind’s lecture in 4.1 critique the portrayal of romantic love in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander?

  14. Act 4, Scene 1 • Watch the clip. • Discussion questions: • How does Rosalind’s introductory conversation with Jaques set the scene for her more extensive conversation with Orlando? Can you make any connection to Emerson’s statement, “Traveling is a fool’s paradise” (“Self-Reliance”)? • What does Rosalind teach Orlando about women, love, lust, and marriage? What attitude(s) is she trying to correct? Find quotations to illustrate your point? • Rosalind is clearly teaching Orlando, but is she learning as well? If so, what? Is she insecure about anything? What about pride—is she guilty of it?

  15. First Question • How does Rosalind’s introductory conversation with Jaques set the scene for her more extensive conversation with Orlando? Can you make any connection to Emerson’s statement, “Traveling is a fool’s paradise” (“Self-Reliance”)?

  16. Second Question • What does Rosalind teach Orlando about women, love, lust, and marriage? What attitude(s) is she trying to correct? Find quotations to illustrate your point?

  17. What does Rosalind teach Orlando? • Men don’t die from love (4.1.101-2), though people do die for various reasons. • Women change after they are married (4.1.142). • Women don’t fight fairly: a woman turns a discussion about her faults into a discussion of her husband’s. • Lust comes in at the eyes in Shakespeare’s plays (4.1.205); cf. “doting” in MSND. • Lust is to kissing as love is to talk (4.1.68 and 5.2.49). • Humility? Idealism? Fear?

  18. What Does This Exchange Say about Sexuality? • Orlando at 5.2.49: Orlando says, “I can live no longer by thinking.” • 5.2.57ff.: Rosalind says, “Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things. I have, since I was three years old, conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. . . . I say I am a magician.”

  19. A Possible Answer • “If Rosalind makes a veiled allusion to Medea, the magical maiden whom Jason, the Orlando figure, seeks to wed, then magic may be women’s answer to masculine lust, just as reason is men’s defense against feminine seduction.” --Dr. Fike

  20. More on Sexuality • Insights from Montrose’s “‘The Place of a Brother’ In As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” page 50: • Snake = phallic sexuality, which Orlando must overcome in order to be appropriately married to Rosalind. • Maternal lion = the temptation to treat his wife as his mother. • Cf. Carl Jung, CW 7, par. 316, page 197: “The modern civilized man has to forgo this primitive but nonetheless admirable system of education. The consequence is that the anima, in the form of the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife; and the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish, sentimental, dependent, and subservient, or else truculent, tyrannical, hypersensitive, always thinking about the prestige of his superior masculinity.”

  21. Third Question • Rosalind is clearly teaching Orlando, but is she learning as well? If so, what? Is she insecure about anything? What about pride—is she guilty of it?

  22. Does Rosalind Learn Too? • She thinks that love is a sport or a game (1.2.24-26). • In the forest, she tries to expose the same illusions that she is guilty of herself. • In particular, when she lectures Phoebe on pride (“Sell when you can. You are not for all markets” [3.5.60]), she may be speaking about her own foibles as well. • She is in love: “How many fathom deep I am in love!” (4.1.197).

  23. Summary Chart • AYLI Chart 2

  24. Final Points • Rosalind’s purpose is to give Orlando a healthful dose of reality so that he won’t be disappointed later on. Spin control. • But she needs a bit of her own advice too. • Does she get a raw deal? Orlando is inferior intellectually and socially, and by marrying him she disinherits herself. See 5.4.167-68 (Orlando gets a dukedom). Does this bother anybody? Here Bloom’s finest female commits herself to married life with a lesser, poorer man who gets her inheritance. Is that really as we like it? END

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